Who remembers acoustic tape computer storage?
A few weeks ago I wrote about the influence Sir Clive Sinclair had on my tech career:
Here is the man who wanted a flying car…
As part of that article I spoke about my first computer, a ZX81 kit. Now for the younger readers we did have floppy disks back then, floppy disks that bent, as opposed to the floppy disks that were rigid (old tech gets complicated), but they were only for the rich home computer enthusiasts (nerds in garages, named Gates, Jobs or Woz). The mass storage for my ZX81 was an audio cassette tape player, something like the one below and the data was an audio file, which you could listen to and did listen to whilst watching the fuzzy loading screen.
In 1983, Simon Goodwin, who was a Sinclair computer enthusiast (nerd) persuaded the radio station he worked at to transmit some audio data files. Then some Sinclair computer enthusiasts (nerds) recorded these from air and managed to load the data into their computers. You have to remember there was no internet back then to occupy these type of people!
Well jump to today and people are trying the same experiment using the internet and podcasts – here is the story:
Podcast to attempt to send out software via audio • The Register
The one thing I regret from this story is that I did not know about the radio transmissions back in 1983, otherwise I would have recorded them and tried to load them into my ZX81!
Clive Catton MSc (Cyber Security) – by-line and other articles
